margin of safety

1. Accounting: An excess of a company's actual sales revenue over the breakeven sales revenue, expressed usually as a percentage. The greater this margin, the less sensitive the company to any abrupt fall in revenue. Formula: (Actual sales revenue - Breakeven sales revenue) x 100 ÷ Actual sales revenue.

2. Occupational safety: The maximum amount of exposure to a hazardous substance that produces no measurable ill-effect in test animals, divided by the actual amount of exposure received by the human population.